Seven feet from the foldout bed, I couldn’t seem to move anymore. I leaned dizzily against the kitchen counter.
“You’ve still got some fever,” Tammy said from behind me. “You haven’t really eaten for a couple of days. You’ve lost blood.”
I tried to straighten up and the pain in my knee bloomed like a fireball. I didn’t dare let go of the counter. If someone knows you need them, it gives them a weapon to hurt you over and over again. But the counter began to tilt and slide. “Help me.”
I thought for a moment she was going to fold her arms and say, Pretty please, but her response was a neutral “Back to bed?”
“Bathroom first.”
She took my arm and some of my weight. “You really are a stubborn asshole,” but the hard look had faded, and while I was balancing carefully on the toilet she went and got me one of the oversize T-shirts she slept in. It wasn’t easy to get it over the bandages on my head and neck.
By the time I got back to bed my knee felt as though someone had poured molten tin in the joint.
“You shouldn’t have gotten up,” Tammy said as she lifted my leg onto the bed for me.
“No.”
“Probably needs more ice.”
“Heat would be better,” I said. “There’s a hot pack in one of the storage bays. Stick it in the microwave.” She pulled the blanket up to my chest. “Why is it so cold in here?”
“Because there’s not a lot of propane left, and I didn’t know how long you were going to be sick.”
“What about the solar panels?”
She just gestured at the window: heavy overcast.
I nodded. “When you get the hot pack, bring the first aid kit, too. Please.”
She raised her eyebrows at the “Please,” but brought the kit back with the hot pack. “I turned the heat up.” We unbandaged the knee. “Looks painful.”
“It is,” I said shortly, then swore as she nudged it positioning the hot pack.
“You hold it, then.” I did. She brought me a glass of water and two pills.
“No more Vicodin.”
“They’ll help with the pain.”
“I don’t want any more Vicodin.” Pain reduces everyone to childishness. It reduces, full stop.
She put pills and glass on the table and gave me a look that said, You’re crazy.
“I do want to take a look at my throat, though.”
I told her what I needed, and when she had the warm water and Band-Aids and mirror assembled, I put the hot pack aside and unwrapped the thin towel around my neck.
The cut was about three inches long, not deep, but wide. When I turned my head this way and that, it gaped and seeped at the center. I set about the grim business of cleaning it.
“Are you going to leave it unwrapped like that?”
“I’m letting the skin around it dry so I can put some Band-Aids on.” Steri-Strips would have been better, but I didn’t have any. I picked up the scissors and cut chunks out of two sides of a Band-Aid so that what was left looked a bit like a very short dumbbell. I peeled away the sterile backing and put it over the slash in my neck so that the edges of the cut were pulled together. Instant butterfly suture. I did it all twice more. It shouldn’t scar too badly. Then I smeared antibiotic ointment over the seam and dabbed some on my face, and the backs of my hands.
“I don’t see why you don’t just go to the doctor.”
“Hospitals are… they have bad associations for me.”
She gave me a jaded look. “Like they don’t for everyone else?”
After a moment I said, “I didn’t take that last antibiotic you were trying to give me, did I?”
“No.” She brought the glass of water back and pulled the bottle out of her pocket again. “How did you get all this stuff, anyway?”
“I asked my doctor.”
“You said, ‘Hey, doc, I kill people for a living and sometimes they fight back, so can I have pills and stuff, in case?’ ”
“I don’t, and he didn’t. Fight back.”
“Then—”
“It was later. I got careless.” Which wouldn’t happen when I went to Arkansas for the girl. That trip would be planned down to the last detail, no more mistakes. No one would ever know I’d been there, until the girl went missing. I wrapped my neck again.
“So? How did you get her to give you the drugs?”
“Him.”
“Whatever.”
“I travel all over, sometimes to remote areas. If you’re somewhere like Kamchatka and get a compound fracture, you can’t just phone a pharmacy. There might not be a doctor for several hundred miles. He gives me prescriptions so I’ll always have antibiotics, and morphine, and a few other things.”
“You’ve got morphine in there?”
“I used it up, in Norway.”
“Norway again.”
I blinked. Pain might chew away at your defenses until you said whatever came into your head, but obviously the narcotic-based Vicodin had been worse. “Pass the heating pad, please.” She did.
“Doesn’t look like it’s helping much.”
It wasn’t.
“Changed your mind about the Vicodin?”
I started to shake my head, hissed as my neck pulled and the throbbing in my scalp started up again.
“Right, what was I thinking? Of course it’s better to grind your teeth and make the veins in your forehead stick out in pain than to take a couple of pills. Great. Fantastic. Especially the part where you start to get mean and shout at me again. Can’t wait.”
I didn’t want to babble my head off again about Julia. Julia was mine. Had been mine. Julia?
Tammy stood up. “I’ll make us something to eat.”
Julia?
Tammy banged and clattered resentfully in the kitchen. The pain in my knee slid like a superficial warm layer over the terrible ache deep in a part of me I couldn’t reach, couldn’t even name.
“Listen,” I said.
Bang, clatter.
“Tammy—”
She turned, snapped “I’m doing soup,” and went back to stirring.
“Listen. I need you to listen. We met in Atlanta. They were trying to kill her but I said I’d keep her safe. She was paying me to help her find out who killed her friend. But that wasn’t why I was doing it, although I didn’t know that. Well, I did, but I’d never loved anyone before. We went to Norway—”
Tammy looked up from her soup. “Norway?”
“—I thought it would be safer there.” Home was supposed to be safe. “She had business in Oslo, but when we went to Lustrafjord, it wasn’t business anymore.”
Tammy left her soup and sat on the foot of the bed.
I tried to explain how I’d shown Julia who I was by taking her to the seter, the farm where I’d spent my childhood summers, but it came out sounding like a bad romance: boats on the fjord, sun on the water, flowers on the fjell. “She went back to Oslo for a meeting. One of the killers came for me by the glacier lake. He shot me.”
I rolled up the left sleeve of my T-shirt. The bullet had hit my shoulder blade, bounced a bit, and traveled down the underside of my arm. The scar was pink and puckered, no longer an ugly purple red.
She looked at it. “You could have that fixed.”
“He shot me, so I broke his legs and left him to die. There was no choice because I couldn’t call the police to help him, or to help Julia, because if they found him they’d detain me, stop me from helping her.” I’ll protect you, I’d said. “So I did it, left him without a second thought.”
But I didn’t help her. I went to the blue place, forgot that it wasn’t just me against them. Forgot that Julia was in the middle.